Maps are universal forms of communication, easily understood and appreciated regardless of culture or language. This truly magisterial book introduces readers to the widest range of maps ever considered in one volume: maps from different time periods and a variety of cultures; maps made for divergent purposes and depicting a range of environments; and maps that embody the famous, the important, the beautiful, the groundbreaking, and the amusing. Built around the functions of maps - the kinds of things maps do and have done - maps confirms the vital role of maps throughout history in commerce, art, literature, and national identity. The book begins by examining the use of maps for wayfinding, revealing that even maps as common and widely used as these products of historical circumstances and cultural differences. The second chapter considers maps whose makers employed the smallest of scales to envision the broadest of human stages - the world, the heavens, even the act of creation itself. The next chapter looks at maps that are, literally, at the opposite end of the scale from cosmological and world maps - maps that represent specific parts of the world and provide a close-up view of areas in which their makers lived, worked, and moved. Having shown how maps help us get around and make sense of our greater and lesser worlds, "Maps" then turns to the ways in which certain maps can be linked to particular events in history, exploring how they have helped Americans, for instance, to understand their past, cope with current events, and plan their national future. The fifth chapter considers maps that represent data from scientific instruments, population censuses, and historical records. These maps illustrate, for example, how diseases spread, what the ocean floor looks like, and how the weather is tracked and predicted. Next comes a turn to the imaginary, featuring maps that depict entire fictional worlds, from Hell to Utopia and from Middle Earth to the fantasy game World of Warcraft. The final chapter traces the origins of map consumption throughout history and ponders the impact of cartography on modern society. A companion volume to the most ambitious exhibition on the history of maps ever mounted in North America, "Maps" will challenge readers to stretch conventional thought about what constitutes a map and how many different ways we can understand graphically the environment in which we live. Collectors, historians, mapmakers and users, and anyone who has ever "gotten lost" in the lines and symbols of a map will find much to love and learn from in this book.

Lawrence W. Towner, historian and head of one of the country's largest independent research libraries, was also an eloquent spokesman for the humanities. Throughout his career - first as a historian and then as head of the Newberry Library - he developed and expressed a coherent vision for the role of humanities scholarship in American society, voicing the needs of scholars and research institutions while searching for a balance between the scholar's freedom of research and his or her social responsibility. While at the Newberry Library he built and focused its prestigious collections, in his words "an uncommon collection of uncommon collections". He pioneered in the preservation of books and manuscripts, and created major research centers, establishing the library as a community of scholars with a broad outreach to a variety of publics. He established research centers for cartography, Renaissance Studies, the history of the American Indian, and family and community history; the last two reflected his longstanding interest in utilizing underused library resources to develop neglected aspects of history. The essays and talks gathered in Past Imperfect cover a broad range of topics of continuing relevance to the humanities and to scholarship in general. Part I collects Towner's historical essays on the indentured servants, apprentices, and slaves of colonial New England that are standards of the "new social history". The pieces in Part II express his vision of the library as an institution for research and education; here he discusses the rationale for the creation of research centers, the Newberry's pioneering policies for conservation and preservation, and the ways in which collectionswere built. In Part III Towner writes revealingly of his co-workers and mentors. Part IV assembles his statements as "spokesman for the humanities", addressing questions of national priorities in funding, and of so-called elitist scholarship versus public programs. These essays, talks, internal memoranda, and letters capture "Bill" Towner's personality and span the wide range of his experience and expertise. Expressing Towner's coherent vision of the place of humanities, libraries, and scholarship in American life, Past Imperfect will be of interest to anyone concerned about the future of the humanities in modern society.

In 1905 Homer Sargent Michaels, an automobile agent based in Chicago, developed an unusual solution to one of the thorniest problems facing early motorists: how to find one's way from one city to another along the poorly marked rural roads of the time. Michaels's solution was to take photographs of every major intersection or turning point along a given route. The resulting books--ancestors of today's digital in-car navigation systems--were remarkably useful, but few copies survive. Now the Chicago Map Society, in collaboration with the Newberry Library, has compiled a new edition of one of Michaels's 1905 guides showing the route from Chicago to Lake Geneva, a resort town in southern Wisconsin. This new edition reproduces the entire guide, along with brief explanations and new photographs of the same locations today, as well as an introduction by the Newberry Library's curator of maps, Robert W. Karrow Jr. Chicago to Lake Geneva, Then and Now is a stellar presentation of a historical artifact--and a fascinating drive down memory lane.